Downvote Pool Deep Dive

in #steem5 years ago

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Hello Steemians, I’m @vandeberg, Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit and today I want to do a more technical deep dive in to the proposed downvote pool in the Steem EIP. One of the core tenants of Steem is the belief in the wisdom of the crowd to curate and reward good content. The current economic model limits every account's ability to earn by a resource called "voting mana". Whenever your vote, whether it be an upvote, downvote, or changing your vote, some of this voting mana is used up. When it is all gone, your votes no longer impact rewards.

Of these three actions, only one of them rewards the user, upvoting. Neither changing your vote nor downvoting can reward you. It then makes sense that if you greedily optimize your return on investment, you would only upvote content as downvoting it would be a waste of your precious voting mana.

However, downvoting is an integral piece of the curation process. An ideal solution would incentivize downvoting with rewards, but we have yet to come up with a solution that is fair and not exploitable. In the meantime, we believe allowing users to have some downvotes without consuming their voting mana is a reasonable solution. While it does not incentivize curating through downvotes, it removes the direct cost of downvoting, which should make downvoting a more economically viable option.

What we propose to do is to create a separate downvote pool that can contain its own mana up to some percentage of the mana that the upvote pool can contain. Downvotes will be taken from the downvote pool first, and then the upvote pool once the downvote pool has been consumed. The downvote pool will follow the same rules as the upvote pool, regenerating over five days and filling instantly and proportionally to new Steem Power and delegations.

We think having a downvote pool that is 10-25% the size of the voting mana pool would serve as a good starting point. The good way to think of this is that a certain number of downvotes are free before you are charged for downvoting. Charged only in the sense that you are losing potential rewards you could have gotten from upvoting. That number needs to be high enough to make a difference, but not too high that it becomes exploitable.

The obvious alternative solution is to have two entirely separate pools for upvotes and downvotes. We believe this is a bad idea because it would allow the reward system to devolve into a zero sum game without consequence. Each account could award and remove an equal number of reward shares to content. If everyone did this, then no content would have any reward shares and would then not get any reward.

Furthermore, there are users out there that understand this change is adding resources for them to use and will use whatever resources they have available. A downvote against someone else is a small upvote for everyone else. We expect some users will use all their downvotes to maximize their returns. In an effort to curb that behavior, we are recommending to not create a full separate pool.

This hybrid approach captures the best of both approaches. It does not give too many additional resources to users that will use/abuse all that we give them and frees up normal users that may not be downvoting to do so without financial penalty.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below, or if there is another aspect of the blockchain that I should explore next.

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Maybe you remember that I would support the implementation of a "convergent linear rewards curve". Concerning 'downvotes' I had the following thoughts (copied from my own post "My STEEM Vision."):

I think it's good and right that the possibility to flag (now called downvoting) exists in a decentralized social network. How else can spam or even worse, such as child pornography, be fought? I also think it makes sense in principle to be able to reduce the reward for posts that are extremely overrated from one's own point of view.
The crux, however, is that downvotes are often set for the sole reason of pursuing other users, solely because of their dissenting opinions or even completely independent of what they write(!), and denying them permanent visibility and any rewards. This is counterproductive to say the least and makes a devastating impression on newcomers who happen to observe such 'flag wars' or even get into them! We should be aware of this.
If it were up to me, ways and means would have to be found to contain 'flag wars' waged purely for personal motives. For example, a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power could be called in such cases and then decide whether the flags were justified or not.
In my opinion the suggestion to provide each user with a certain number of free downvotes so that spam (or overvalued posts) would be flagged more frequently in the future, wouldn't really make a big difference under the current conditions. I assume that only whales flagged more often than before, while smaller accounts would still not dare to do so for fear of retaliation.

Nevertheless, your idea of the "hybrid approach" is interesting and at least makes it somewhat less profitable to flag a lot, "just for fun".

I like your view which does not fall aside from Steemit view (I think). And wanted to just comment on something you said that is quite interesting...

If it were up to me, ways and means would have to be found to contain 'flag wars' waged purely for personal motives. For example, a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power could be called in such cases and then decide whether the flags were justified or not.

This is basically a DAO for me. Which would make lots of sense, to me.

So, elaborating on your idea... a pool of STEEM could be "formed" based on either the weight of how much people like about the DAO representatives. The POOL would not be owned by anyone specifically and it would be up to the "board" that represent and execute the "work" how to spend that POOL on downvoting "cases" (no matter the size, but I would imagine that bigger ones would tend to be more popular here). This would be something like a justice council for complex schemes of downvoting within the community. Just like a court... of some sort... But one that gets decided by the community.

Does it make any sense for you guys?

Does it make any sense for you guys?

If you ask me: yes, something like that (the idea still needs further elaboration) ...
Of course there shouldn't be discussed every single flag because that would be huge amount of work and too time-consuming. I see it as a means for cases like when - for example - one user feels threatened in his STEEM existence because a whale is permanently flagging him.

The "time-consuming" to me, is always something to sort with UIs and some AI-assisted facilitation for the user... But I understand why you mentioned it. In the future this will become less prone to "hard work" based activity, and there will be more intelligent ways for users to do analysis and make decisions quicker.

Hm ... apart from the fact that it could be possible to support decision making in future by AI, would you be in favour of deciding about every single flag?
I had in mind that such a 'committee' would only get active if someone complains ... but of course that's not the only thinkable option.

Not every single flag... I would think it as, "you need to bring a special case". In my view the community should be the one to flag. But on situations of power or scheme where the user is somehow imprisoned either by lack of power or because of "bugs"... this committee should be there "to make things better". They might not be able to solve all problems, and that is a consequence of who votes for the committee.

AI will mostly (or should) help with analysis of things. Giving you valuable information about what's happening without you having to go and look for everything (which is practically already impossible on STEEM).

Here is our new post with a few proposals that address the issues you are mentioning and put possible solutions on the table from the perspective of the antiabuse community:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jaguar.force/a-few-modest-proposals-regarding-the-downvote-pool-1559521991347
We eagerly look forward to your feedback.

Hi, in general users/organization like you(rs) are very important for the platform.

Here my questions:

  • Do you 'only' fight against spam and plagiarism (which is great anyway) or also against flag abuse? Look for example at the self-upvoted whale comment on top under the recent article of @timcliff and the automatically flagged (from alt accounts of the same whale) comment under this comment.
    I think if whales upvote their own comments (by the way full of bad language) like this, while at the same time flagging other comments, that causes the same damage for STEEM like plagiarism. Of course I would flag this comment (but only if I intended to stop posting forever on STEEM, because of the expected retaliation flags) ... :)

  • Please check my answer to @steemcleaners under this post. I think @steemcleaners, you and other useful groups fighting against spam and plagiarism should communicate directly under the the post of accused people with them (and at least at first in a constructive and friendly way; not everybody is using places like Discord or Steem Chat, and not everybody making a mistake always had bad intentions).
    Also please read what I wrote there concerning well known myths/sagas ...

  • In your post you are asking for delegations. Do people who are delegating you get any kind of interest/rewards?

  • Apart from that your ideas in the mentioned article are both very interesting.

ok.. some speek english

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It good that we are thinking about this.

i think overall downvotes are bad. They tend to create a lot more damage then good and create really bad user experience.

We have lost many great content producers because of downvotes.

I urge you to keep this in mind.

Even if I just get 20% if my voting power as free downvotes, i can now run around and take money away from people and would have to do this, in order to maximize my rewards. This will lead to people downvoting each other and will create a culture of downvote wars, that can be nasty.

Please keep this in mind.

Bad user experience exist because people are so greedy that they think about potential rewards as if they were their already. They aren't.
Steem users decide what content should be rewarded more (by allocating positive reward shares) and what should be rewarded less (by allocating negative reward shares).
Because in first case they are directly rewarded for such choice (via curation rewards or in case of self-voting also via author rewards), they tend to do that much, much, much more frequently than in the second case.
It's far easier to accept "random" upvote than "random" downvote.
Downvoting others wouldn't maximize your rewards. It returns potential rewards back to the pool so they can be shared by everyone. Moreover, community would be able to respond to "unfair" downvotes without cost (to some extent, i.e. % pool)

In the end, Steem is all about reaching consensus, in this case consensus on value of post, thus how it should be rewarded.
We are not ripped off when our content is downvoted.
We are ripped off when our Reward Pool is ripped by abusers.

Who was I abusing in this post reply thread to have been downvoted so hard? My comments were dissenting, nothing more. Bots were used to give more weight to my words, but in the case above I did not use that bot. Someone else did because their vote weight was not sufficient enough. It wasn't self-voting. It wasn't abuse. It was just an opinion someone with more money didn't like.

"Abuse" is a bit too strong of a word this case, but people have spoken that they did not find your content worthy of rewards.

Yes, value of dissenting opinions is also important and should be partially preserved, but in my opinion (speaking for my own downvote) stating that "Weighted Downvotes = Theft" is too ridiculous to be rewarded on par with other content. Other people are free to decide otherwise.

And regarding weighted power... I agree this is not ideal, but I can't think of any other solutions. Either the "best" guys have the most power, everyone is equal or something and between. In the former case there is at least some correlation between a person's (or, sadly, bot's) "quality", leaving abuse opportunities for "the rich", in the latter there are abuse opportunities if you manage to get a hold of a large number of accounts.

In my opinion the weighted option is better.

Since you brought up changing your vote perhaps you can look into how that works. As I understand it (but I could be wrong and have not searched into the code), changing a vote from 20% to 21% takes mana of a 21% vote, not a 1% vote (and in addition forfeits any curation rewards that the original 20% vote may have earned). This creates an incentive to split ones stake up into tiny pieces so that instead of changing a vote one can just add another 1% from a different account.

If there is not actually any exploit here (and perhaps it is not the exact one I mentioned but some other one with respect to changing votes), I would also be interested to learn that since the claim has been made to me that there is, and that users without fleets of many small/bot accounts are placed at a disadvantage.

Why can't negative curation be the reverse of positive curation?
The downvoters get their curation rewards just like upvoters?
Maybe winner takes all?
More downvotes than upvotes and the downvoters get all the curation rewards, and vice versa?

That's being handled by @inertia's Stingy token. Opt in today!

Winner takes all is not a good option, because it might easily sway voting. Once there is a certain number of votes, it will become less and less attractive to vote against the majority. Not only will this skew the results naturally, but might also encourage practices like early upvote/downvote spam, to set the initial trend in hopes that it will keep rolling later on.

What about downvotes taking curation then if they exceed curation taking author rewards?

I don't know. At the first glance it would make sense for downvotes to be treated like upvotes (as you suggest in your previous post, I was only contending the "winner takes all" part), at least to some extent, and I don't see any issues with that, but it doesn't mean there must be none. I only spoke up about what I was pretty sure to be fundamentally flawed. By no means I claim to have a perfect (or even demonstrably good) solution for the problem.

By the way, "winner takes all" was how League of Legends (MOBA game) Tribunal system worked - reported players were judged by the community in a punish / don't punish vote, "judges" were rewarded if they cast a vote that eventually won. Even though you could not see how the voting went so far, wondering how people would vote was still a big part of the decision instead of the actual offences commited by the player. The system was later retracted (and replaced by other means of dishing out common punishments, which are arguably worse, but that's another story).

Hmm, so straight up and down voting.
Perhaps the stake, that ostensibly belongs not to stinc, but to the chain, could do what steemflagrewards does. Reward abuse fighting.

Or separate up and down voting pools.

The way it is works if the big stake values capital gains over extracting inflation, they currently don't.
They cut their own throats because they have their roi and are playing with none of their own money.

Ultimately, its the ninjamine that destroyed the balance.
With an 800mv influence cap, rewards and curation worked just fine.
We even gained users.

I cant wait for the truth to be exposed.
Why are some people working against steem's success?

With an 800mv influence cap, rewards and curation worked just fine.

That might be a good idea to bring back, or anything else that will cause diminishing returns in power the more popular you get. For example logarithms (e.g. 1 popularity measures = 1 measure of power, 10 popularity = 2 power, 100 popularity = 3 power, 1000 -> 4 or 1->1, 2->2, 4->3, 8->4, 16->5 etc.) or roots (e.g. 1->1, 4->2, 9->3, 16-> 4, 25-> 5 etc.).

This way you could both "climb the social ladder of importance", but you couldn't as easily become a "social tyrant" of sorts, who cannot be "overthrown".

Oh, the last one is simple, wherever there's a possibility for abuse for personal gain, especially without negative consequences, sooner or later it will be exploited.

I'm here just because I'm curious how such "alternative market" behaves (and also because the currently major social media sites mostly suck, but I don't have high hopes for steem in particular). I'm not an economy major or something like that either.

Yes. Maybe. Winner takes all sounds exciting like you said. But I would prefer having no downvote/flag option and to keep the upvote separate from a like and dislike and viewed. I would rather have separate pools for each person as opposed to one pool for everybody. But then again, I guess Steem is similar to Bitcoin in some ways and Bitcoin has one big pool as well and I guess that is ok.

Could you please explain in detail, what influences/increases/decreases the total rewards fund? In the two years that I have been active here, i have seen it differ in size between 650.000 and 900.000 Steem.
I never understood what influences the total rewards fund the most. Obviously, the number of votes in the 7 day period and rshares behind those are a factor, but is that all?

Can't wait to see the effect of separate downvote pool on our current trending list, perhaps people will think twice should they really be promoting their content to top spots. Finally the community can start efficiently curating, pushing good content up and bad content down, as we should've been able from the very start.

Thank you for making these posts by the way!

I wonder have you explored how many posts in trending 1-20 spots are promoted over a long period of time? And how much manual, active curation is happening compared to passive?

Good reasoning and good question.

I can answer simply, all top 20 post are promoted. The important question is what's their cost in % and net $ after reward returns.

The answer is; it takes currently a budget of 115$ worth of STEEM to promote a fresh post near the top with cost of about -5%. yes, negative cost, that's a 5% profit. Meaning anything less than a 5$ downvote has no negative effect whatsoever in people promoting bad content to the top.

There are two solution to this.

  1. More downvotes where it matters first, (the top trendings)
  2. Remove all profits to vote buyers by making vote buying more easily accessible to everyone and letting people willing to pay a high premium do so.

A lot of more external money would be interested in buying votes at high premium if the top #trendings were bigger center of attention.

At @Steemium we've been collecting historical data of every bidbot bidding rounds and snapshots of top 50 trending for the last 7 months. Here are some charts that might interest you https://steemium.com/#/statistics/trending

I'm not in support or opposition to the proposal, but I have feedback...

(i) "Let's try it and see what happens" may not be the ideal methodology, and I'm not sure that it demonstrates a sufficient level of fiduciary responsibility for a blockchain with a $120 million market cap.

(ii) Mathematically, there must be a positive-value voting scheme that's functionally equivalent to one that involves voting with negative votes. Or at least one that deescalates the flag wars, rather than providing them with more fuel.

(iii) Something modeled after second price auctions might serve the dual-purposes of discouraging votes that overvalue a post (whether self-vote, collusive voting, or for any other reason), and also disencentivizing downvotes that are wildly out of step with the community.

(iv) If implemented, how long is everything going to be stalled waiting for the rewards pools to return to equilibrium?

(v) Is there any quantitative evidence to suggest that the proposal is better than the status quo?

The challenge with rewarding downvotes is partially in the fact that it is so easy to reward upvotes. If a piece of content gets paid a certain amount, then part of those rewards are shared with the curators. In essence, it is a profit sharing model the rewards earlier upvotes that theoretically took more risk on upvoting than later voters. It is easy to quantify if the upvote was worth it based on the resulting payout.

How do you quantify the success of a downvote? If it made sense to concentrate downvotes on bad content, then you could reward those downvotes in a similar fashion to upvotes. But then you run in to the awkward question of how you would reward an upvote on content that made 0 STEEM. It doesn't make sense that you would reward the upvote. After all, the community determined the content was worthless. Why would you reward someone for thinking the content was valuable? That situation highlights the intuition we have when the rules are mirrored that somehow get lost when we look at a downvote in a sea of upvotes. We are open to suggestions on how downvotes might be rewarded and agree that it would be the ideal solution. Our goal with the EIP is not to nail down the ideal, but simply and carefully move closer to it, one step at a time.

Regarding second price auctions, the idea is interesting, but sadly there are simple behaviors that will get around it. If the highest vote gets thrown out, then I will split my stake among more accounts and continue self voting. Then only a fraction of my stake would get ignored via the second price auction rules. Your simulated results are better than expected because they don't account from any emergent behavior as a result of the change. This is one of the biggest challenges faced by the scientific community with regards to social sciences. I appreciate that you are thinking through these problems as well and trying to come up with solutions!

When I have considered rewarding downvotes in the past, my idea was to reward any vote which moves the payout toward its eventual result, but not those which move it away. So for example, if there is an upvote to $10 and then a downvote back down to $0, the downvote would get a reward but the upvote would not. Yes, this means that the downvote got a reward even when the post did not, but this could be justified in that the downvote saved the system money (paying out on something which in the end, was determined to be worthless).

There are no doubt numerous complications and this may not be feasible at all, but I thought I would throw the idea out there again.

So.. A whale could use their 'bonus' downvote power to downvote anyone they don't like the sound of or who disagrees with them (perhaps even disagreeing on the future of Steem, for example). They would then be rewarded for silencing dissent AND increase the rewards available for themselves and their self upvoting in the process.. Win, Win.. for the whales. Lose, lose for anyone who disagrees with them.
I recall we talked through this a few months ago and we didn't reach an agreement - I seem to recall you acknowledged that a separate downvote pool has it's problems.. I still think that a separate downvote pool has HUGE problems and as others have pointed out - many of them are as much psychological as anything else. New users don't like diving into a pool where the food sources are already heavily controlled by a small number of 'fish'. If those fish are actually sharks and now have the ability to not only hoard the food, but actively remove it from others on a large scale - then very few people will want to be here.
This community relies on those with the most stake making 'good' decisions for the community, but in reality, few agree on what that means and the typical approach seems to be "well, of course I'm going to do everything I can to maximise my 'return' - I'm funding all of you other users anyway". This is, unfortunately, more of an anti-social networking approach than a social one.
I feel what has been lacking is a shared vision and mission for Steem that everyone can align with. Adding the ability to create more division, without adding a powerful aligning mechanism to unite people is a recipe for disaster imo.

There can be no shared vision in a system which is designed to favor particular stakeholders. Steem is such a system, and stakeholders are inherently opposed to one another by the metric through which some are preferentially favored. The essential metric here is stake. The more stake you have, the more you are favored.

Want a shared vision? Create a platform that potentiates it. Wanna see more downvotes? Make them cheaper for whales that can afford them, like the bully that'll flag this comment. The only proof anyone needs that the DV pool will be abused to further harm ordinary users will be visible in response to this comment.

Thanks!

It should be noted that iflagtrash just follows you and automatically downvotes you so it is not curating at all. It is just attacking.

You're correct. It is contrary to the purpose and raison d'etre of a social network to automate votes.

Thanks!

So.. A whale could use their 'bonus' downvote power to downvote

No, a mechanism (a generous description since it is more of a half-baked concept than a true mechanism) as I describe would be a replacement for 'bonus' downvote power, not in addition to it.. Since downvotes and upvotes would both be (under the right conditions) rewarded, there would not be an imbalance the way there is now.

Both downvotes and upvotes are valuable work. The soundness of the system depends on payout being a good measure of value, not too high nor too low. Currently only upvotes are rewarded and downvotes are seen as a public service where the system may benefit but the person doing the downvoting is not recognized in any way for this service. That's a large part of why we see virtually no downvotes.

Anyway, I don't think this is worth a whole lot of discussion since it is nowhere near solid enough to be implemented any time soon.

My comment was really addressing the general concept of a separate downvote pool, but also considering the downvoter being rewarded too. Most of the problems I see also apply to the situation whether downvotes are rewarded or not. I don't have an issue with more downvoting power being 'theoretically' helpful - but in the wider context, considering all the other rules and balances/imbalances, I personally still think it's a bad idea. But hey, it's not up to me - it's up to those with the most stake.. Who, I'm sure, will be looking out for the little guy all the way. lol

Who, I'm sure, will be looking out for the little guy all the way.

I'm about as cynical about this as you are generally speaking, however, in the short term there is a synergy. Most of the big guys do recognize that the little guys (improving both growth and retention) are the path to growth and to the price of Steem ceasing its long spiral toward zero.

This really isn't about the big guys coming up with a way to rape more value from within the system, as most are doing a perfectly fine job of that already. If that were the goal, the best thing to do, and certainly the easiest, would probably be nothing.

more of an anti-social networking approach than a social one.

Great comment, how toxic can we make it?

We'll soon see. I expect EIP to be implemented soon, perhaps even HF21. Will that be enough to shake off all the fleas that parasitize the whales? (one perspective, advocated by bidbots), or enough to eliminate the market that makes the stake of whales have value? (my perspective). My view predicts that implementing EIP will quickly reduce the value of Steem and drop it's rank on CMC. In the event that is the result of EIP, I do hope that the rapine profiteers that have plagued Steem from the beginning will join the exodus, and perhaps allow socially positive corrections to be rapidly implemented in the aftermath.

Completely agree!

True and downvoting is dangerous. I would prefer having likes and dislikes and upvotes and a view count. I understand why people feel like they need downvoting. But, it can be dangerous and stuff like you said.

I see a huge window for whale abuse here. The mechanics seems sound, but the psychology isn't.

We will find ways to deal with it. Stay in touch.

Lol, it seems you've covered it already.

That's very easy to abuse. Whales have a clear incentive to vote against the little guys and essentially rob them of their value, because it wipes away their rewards increasing the available pool for the whale.

Has anyone stopped and considered the basic fundamental question of whether this will bring more users in or drive current users away?

I am betting this drives significantly more users away than it brings in...

There is no way downvotes will be used responsibly which more than negates any possible benefits.

The concept of the EIP is about the combined effect of three changes, not just this one. The idea is to make desirable behavior more profitable, and negative behavior less profitable. Currently it's most profitable (and easiest) to delegate your stake to a bidbot and not even play, which is what many large stakeholders are doing. If it becomes more profitable to actually curate content, people will do that. That means more rewards for good authors, and fewer rewards for bidbot delegation (or self voting) and people who choose not to participate. So - if that goal is achieved, more people curating will in turn lead to more good content and people actually being rewarded for that good content. A small portion of 'free' downvotes is a piece of this puzzle.

I think if people are more likely to receive rewards from the effect of stakeholders participating, they will be much more likely to stay. If good content is being appreciated and curated, people will be more likely to stay. It's part of the value proposition of proof of brain and the current economic incentives don't fully align with that original vision. The EIP attempts to bring us back closer to that goal.

Isn't it possible that proof of brain just doesn't work? I would venture to say that stake weighted voting and proof of brain failed when there is money involved. It was a nice idea but human nature and all that makes it work better in theory than in reality. Continuing down this path would be fool-hearty.

But to go down this path slightly... so you think the cure is for stake holders to spend their time on here sniffing out the 10 "highest quality" posts each day among the thousands of other posts? And we think that system will appeal to people? No one wants to come on here and spend all day searching through posts to find the "10 best", it's not fun, it's a job.

And what would compel people to invest money into that system?!

Again, I think you guys need to step back and ask yourself if this is more likely to bring in more people than it drives away? If the answer is no, or not sure, the idea should be scrapped immediately.

People want to be rewarded for their good content. That concept is solid, no doubt about it. People want to be able to monetize their content. Giving incentive to reward good content drives engagement. User's seeing good content being rewarded drives user's to our front door. Using your stake to generate rewards is an incentive to hold SP.

Are there other things that can be done that help user retention? Absolutely - but most of them are front end / applications level work, not blockchain development... The first thing that comes to mind is communities, and the list of other things is certainly long, but attainable.

Under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.
As long as you cannot contain this kind a flagging (for example by institute an elected committee with much delegated SP), I am strictly against a pool of free flaggs.

Ok, but what defines "good content"? Everyone has a different definition of what "good" is, with a major bias towards their own.

But besides that point, we likely won't even get to that part of the discussion because the vast majority of downvotes will be personal in nature instead of altruistic and responsible. What is your solution for that?

I think seeking perfection with this is really dangerous. I'm in favor of very slow and highly tested development for the curation and distribution systems of steem. The problem with current algos (curation) they are gamed with ML . But that brings you to the bidbots. The bidbots should be used as advertising in certain bidbot feeds on the front ends. I'm really much happier when we find front end solutions to a potentially , non existent blockchain problem. Maybe our problem's solution is just right in front of us. Advertising is a natural thing. How can steemit really innovate the advertising markets and turn them upside down completely? That's your bidbot fix.

Hopefully you are wrong about that, because the Hobo Media project aims to do exactly what you just described. Allow for people to do the "job" of voting the top 10 best journalistic pieces on Steem for the day for large rewards. This concept should work if the theme is sort of like a writing competition, however, in order for that to work the reward needs to be significant.

Isn't it possible that proof of brain just doesn't work? I would venture to say that stake weighted voting and proof of brain failed when there is money involved.

You are talking about yourself, only.

I see no reason that increasing curation rewards in any way changes the extant dynamic for profiteers. It just increases the value to them of upvotes. Increasing curation rewards will be adapted to by bots to encourage hassle free profiteering via delegation.

The actual solution is to remove the ability of stake to profiteer from their votes. I have repeatedly pointed out one mechanism that can do that, the Huey Long algorithm.

I am confident that better minds than mine, such as your own, can devise others. After the EIP fork fails, do give it nominal consideration, please.

I agree, I'm not sure if or why this is actually a priority, except when it comes to the victim's of flag wars. Many of which aren't producing bad content, or plagiarizing. They simply are the "bad guys" to the wrong whales.
Not that this is an easy answer but I think the priority should be to attract new users and let the flag wars continue, and hope those good content producers who have been chased off, are replaced by many new ones!

I just fail to see how this change attracts new users in any way... and that should be our focus. Attracting and keeping users, this change likely does the opposite of that in my opinion.

It's been proven that downvotes won't be used responsibly, even when they had a cost.

The same shop. The same chef. The same ingredients. The same taste. The same price. But now, we are wondering how our pizza-shop will be affected if we start cutting it into 6 pieces instead of 8 pieces

Is it going to attract new customers - no
Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no
Will it change the earnings of our pizza shop - no

red button, redistribution, changing ratio authors/curators are not going to create anything measurable. Maybe it can even affect negatively because people will be wondering why on Earth those people are discussing this topic when they have at least 100 more important problems?

Shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. SMTs and communities are the only shot out of this mess at this point, though I think these changes will be a net negative, so even worse than just shuffling the deck chairs.

"Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no"
I have seen quite a chilling effect on many that I follow. A few of which have been "chased" off and no longer post and have powered down. But your other 2 points I 100% agree. Before they went dark they posted several instances where simple malice were the reason for their flags. Initial content was flagged, they (content creator's) objected, waves of more flags ensued. It had nothing to do w/bad content after the initial flag, which is obviously subjective to begin with...

I think that one of the big things driving away users is new users seeing "shitty" content receiving a big part of the reward shares due to abuse of bots and similar. A downvote pool can be used to discourage bot usage on content which does not deserve to be on the hot or trending page. This guarantees the "quality" of those pages and thus attracts new users in my opinion.

Who defines what's "quality"?

Your premise is that users will use downvotes responsibly even though 3 years of history contradicts that belief.

'can' is not will. But few users will deploy their downvotes in a way devs have modeled. Most people don't flag, and won't. Most people that do don't do so for reasons we want them to, but because they're pissed off at what someone said.

That's why this comment will be flagged. That's all the proof we need that this will only make things worse.

Actually 3 years of history have proven that down votes won't be used responsibly. It will be 95% personal.

You make a lot of assumptions as to what a bad comment is. There is already Whales with a network of bots that target people with certain ideas, every time they post, every time they comment. We see a couple of the people affected already commenting within the posts.
Rewarding downvotes isn't a very bright thing to do with the president ready to regulate social media companies, and as facebook and others are meddling in European Elections....and we might see a bit of that here on the steem block chain.

While I haven't been the target of these bots [gulp, yet]. What we aren't seeing is the purging of bad ideas, but the purging of political expression upon ideological lines-classic content based discrimination. If president Trump pushes an online internet bill of rights, I don't think your company is quite prepared to deal with first amendment issues if you think a vote is sufficient. Afterall, the Greeks voted to ostracize Aristades the just for 10 years. And here the decision to ostracize are weighted in a light favorable to those with the biggest money.

To counter these downvotes, some users may have to spend upwards of $1000 (in some cases tens of thousands)...just to break even against these bots...so their posts appears on the main steemit site with images and text...which defeats much of the marketing and incentive behind steem. It is just easier, and in many cases they do, just quit the platform and that hurts the community more.

You guys are struggling to grow in the marketplace as social media giants are purging their users and as they and others are fleeing elsewhere. And instead of welcoming in new users, you continuously harm the community with your laughable ideas at how to make the platform better.

You may simple wish to recognize certain bots that deal with plagiarism/obscenity issues such as cheetah or steemitcleaners can do harmful downvotes for cleaning up the chain, but you may want to completely abolish the downvote option for other users.

Also, how about editing steemit so that the tags we use automatically go into the meta tags so we can benefit from SEO searches. Make it some people browsing the web can find the content we post. Trying to enhance the user experience, trying to grow the number of users, trying to expand user interaction should be the focus-not pissing the existing community off.

Regarding second price auctions, the idea is interesting, but sadly there are simple behaviors that will get around it. If the highest vote gets thrown out, then I will split my stake among more accounts and continue self voting.

Agreed, although the less accounts I use, the more I have to sacrifice, and the more accounts I use, the easier it is for others to detect and counter. This is also why I thought it would be interesting to see what happens if combined with the converged linear curve.

The act of voting itself should have some kind of "reputation". People should be able to freely and openly agree or disagree on people voting, without affecting rewards. The reason for it, in my view, is to publicly make awareness of "less regular" situations. So, if a whale decides to riot and make a specific user lose all the rewards, but in this case the user is someone honest and does not deserve that, then slowly the community might be able to shift the tide, by knowing that the whale downvote is not being accepted by the community, attracting slowly others that which to shift the tide of that whale.

Not sure if I got myself understood.

I appreciate everyone's different ideas on this, and I don't pretend to have a solution, but I don't think this is it, either, if I'm honest. The flag war people are going to flag war as long as flags exist; that's just how they roll. What stops the little guys from flagging isn't the lack of curation rewards - because our curation rewards aren't much to speak of no matter what we do - it's fear of retaliation from a whale. If a person has enough money to buy bot votes that will put their post on trending for hundreds of dollars, they can flag you into oblivion for pinging it with your pennies worth of downvote. Us minnows will likely flag spammers, because the spammers can't flag us to hell, and it doesn't matter if we don't get our teeny tiny maybe a fraction of a Steem curation. I've flagged spammers. My friends have flagged spammers. But flag a whale and you can kiss your rep and your rewards goodbye.

Why are you obsessed with quantitative evidence? No one can predict what is going to happen to steem after such a change. It's all about trial and error. That's why SMTs are important.

We can try taking an educated guess to make good changes, but those guesses come from experience and not statistical models.

The blockchain at this point should move out of "testing" phase and into the real world. There's enough real world use-data that could be used that no "test" should ever be conducted so blindly. And I dissent your opinion that this would have no "known" negative affect on the blockchain.

In the meantime, we believe allowing users to have some downvotes without consuming their voting mana is a reasonable solution.

That doesn't sound like a good argument. Unlimited downvoting opens the door to censorship like never before.

This is beyond incorrect since steemit has a ui thing it only greys out posts. There are other frontends to use. This in no way would affect your posts, or how they are posted and if they stay on the chain. steemit is a centralized front end not much to expect from that, don't like it choose a new front end or run the condenser in your own way.

Censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing..."

The relevant portion of Encyclopedia Britannica's definition of censorship definitely includes concealing text and requiring another step to reveal it. It may not be complete eradication of information, but no definition of censorship from any source I've read so defines censorship.

Almost no one has the ability to extract data from the blockchain itself, since almost no one is competent to code their own front end. Not only Steemit so censors speech, but all front ends I am aware of in common use. Telling people to 'run condenser in your own way' is like telling people if they don't like commercially available automobiles to just make their own. Maybe you can build a front end. I bet you can't build a car. I can't do either, because I build houses.

This does affect posts, which is the purpose of doing it.

No, ones competent enough to code a front end?

https://steemprojects.com/

Also, there is an assortment of free projects on github dealing with steem. You can also use many other front ends. Steem isn't censorable but most top layer solutions are because companies have to follow the laws of their home-based countries.

People in the community or more than willing to help with things for no charge if you ask to modify the software. Just don't expect massive overhauls for free.

It's not unlimited. There is a separate (and smaller) supply of downvote mana that limits it.

Cause he can't read. All he does is spam share to Steem random stuff that could be done in <1 minute multiple times a day. He probably doesn't even read the shit he shares.

Isn't it great? And many follows through.

Hmm, I don't know what to tell ya. shrug.png

Number (v) is the question I think you all need to ask yourselves and if you don't have a clear answer you need to devise a system to get some sort of objective feedback to determine if you're spending resources on a problem that's not as much of a problem as it might seem or even if it is a problem if this is the solution people even want.

ie. some sort of poll or questionnaire that is "featured" and ideally curated so people are incentivised to participate.

Dude, Steemit Inc doesn't have a CLUE what usability testing is. Even if they did conduct such a poll they wouldn't have any idea how to collate and analyze that data properly.

The logic behind what I'm saying is why spend time and resources on something that nobody wants? Or that a tiny minority want. Getting feedback is free and fast. Maybe the feedback would be overwhelmingly in favor, but without that your just adding features at random.

Features need to be developed around user demand, not just to see if they'll work IMHO.

If only a tiny minority want it then witnesses won't upgrade (and those who do will likely get voted out) and it won't go live.

There has already been some informal consultation (and both recently and in the past some on-chain discussion) with witnesses and large stakeholders which suggest it has a legitimate chance to be adopted, though I also wouldn't rule out that it won't.

With that in mind, if we say it has a (being generous) 30% chance that it wouldn't get approved, are there other features that there is widespread consensus on that have a 90-95% chance of getting approved?

In a nutshell: Will this take time away from Communities or SMT's because that's the stuff EVERYONE wants. Why not just push full Steem ahead on that and after that's out we tweak all this stuff.

Communities are not even a blockchain feature. They are planned to be implemented in hivemind as far as I know, which is a layer on top of the blockchain.

SMTs development isn't finished and I don't know when it is finished, although supposedly that is the next thing to be worked on.

As @baah noted, this particular issue (downvotes) isn't a major coding task either way, but there is a lot of support for some ways of improving the function of the Steem economy.

As far as trying to put percentages on specific features I don't really know. I think it is sufficient that developers don't waste their time on things that have little chance (and that has happened in the past) but I don't really see that here.

"...we won't have any idea, only opinions built solely out of sentiment."

You speak for yourself. As a market research manager in the 1980s, and as an experimental biologist in the 2000s, I learned how to understand data. Throughout that time I maintained successful investments and it is my personal experience that has allowed me to comment cogently and informedly on these matters.

I am not ideologically wed to some dogma, but an iconoclast that speaks from experience. Successful investors with decades of experience do have basis for informed opinions, unlike your textual diarrhea.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

"...Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes."

This is objectively false. Flags can just be omitted via code. Votes altogether can just be omitted via code.

Code is infinitely immutable, and good code can fix every problem bad code creates.

Unfortunately, we're throwing more bad code after bad code, and the problems we already suffer are going to get worse as soon as these code changes are implemented. Incentive to imbue Steem with value isn't effected via extant code, and the tweaks discussed are just going to make that worse, and that's all because the devs either aren't experienced investors, or aren't interested in imbuing Steem with value.

Code currently encourages stakeholders to strip value from Steem by extracting rewards via unlimited upvotes, delegation, etc. Code can change that.

But it won't, because profiteers were encouraged to profit, and presently control the lion's share of stake, and they don't want to change the status quo. Every time disruption occurs, it costs stakeholders profiting from extant conditions.

After these tweaks are implemented and things get worse, feel free to comment to me regarding my comments that that is what will happen. Don't think you will, but feel free to.

You're fucking delusional.

Gravity is why water flows downhill, and code is why people vote the way they do. Code is infinitely mutable, and can be changed, unlike gravity. I'd try to cogently explain how this can be done, but you won't even acknowledge any points I make. I know this because I've attempted to engage with you previously, and that is what you did.

Have a nice day.

The collective body that's deciding which version of code to run has a fiduciary responsibility. To some extent, that includes everyone, but in reality, it's a relatively small group of people.

You can't know with certainty what will happen without trying it, but you can gain an increased level of confidence by doing formal analysis of the change, and developing research-backed theories that are more reliable than our intuitions. You can also increase your level of confidence by running simulations.

Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes

Where is the evidence for this? If self-voting can't be countered through code changes, there's no point in implementing the change. As suggested in item (iii), however, I suspect that they actually can be mitigated by realigning the voting incentives.

I don't want you to provide anything, and I'm not the one that needs to be convinced. I'm content with either decision. I'm saying that the people who decide which version of code to run should demand more than an intuitive demonstration that the change will make things better.

What does better mean? In curation, "better" means that it is more likely to rank a set of posts in the correct order, according to user preferences. So, it seems to me that the witnesses who will run the code should ask whoever is proposing the change to provide some level of evidence that the post ranking after the change is likely to be more correct (closer to matching user preferences) than post ranking before the change.

Again, the way to realign incentives is not through Law but the enforcement of law

Your argument seems self-contradictory. On one hand, you say that the rules don't matter - and we need to just depend on curators to downvote, but you're making that argument in support of a rule change. If we can't solve the problem of incorrect ranking of posts by changing the rules of the game, then why are we having this conversation at all?

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

The point of a content curation system is to produce a ranked list of content. Yes, from the voter's perspective, it's just "I rank this as x dollars", but a good content curation system will aggregate all of those individual decisions into an ordered set that approximates the actual combined preferences of the users so that readers can quickly find things of interest.

In that context, it is possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a particular voting scheme before injecting it into the blockchain.

You should read A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation. There is much to learn, and it suggests several techniques by which the strengths and weakness of any proposal might be quantified before slapping it into the running block chain.

The fallacy in your logic is that you believe everyone will have the same definition of "abuse".

Exactly. You never said it. That's my point. No strawman here. Just facts.

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I would prefer having dislikes and likes and upvotes but not financial downvotes or flags.

If Steemit chooses to continue having flags and downvotes, could they at least choose not to hide flagged posts? I know hidden posts can be revealed. But I don't enjoy clicking on the reveal button to see hidden posts from people, including you. I saw that people flagged your comments. So, I click on show, on reveal, on unhide, to read flagged comments of yours. I understand why flagged posts are hidden, and I understand the thinking behind that system, but I would prefer flagged posts not being hidden. I have heard that Steemit has like a reverse-auction system or whatever you want to call the upvoting / pool / cryptocurrency / blockchain system. So, I understand the philosophy or theory behind how flags can help in that system a whole lot or maybe just a bit.

I understand why things are hidden but I disagree with that way of thinking.

@vandeberg, I think discussions would be more productive if you had them with witnesses and a couple of guys who thought a lot about steem economics (like @donkeypong or @trafalgar etc..). Opening this discussion to everyone doesn't seem to help, judging by the quality of comments under this post. Just informing the community about the changes would be enough, when and if they will come.

We (witnesses) have such conversations all the time, but feedback from "general public" is important. Nobody is perfect, we make mistakes too, we can overlook something.
We can do ours best to make good decisions for the sake of the platform, but in the end we represent SP holders who vote for us. Of course we can't expect that every user to be an expert in Steem internals, but they don't have to. They "hire" witnesses.
TL;DR: it's good to have a feedback, even if it's not that great (of quality) ;-)

Yes but they have to pretend to be asking people their opinion so they can act as if they "care" about the community all whilst doing whatever the fuck suits them best. Quit ball washing. Your nose is brown.

Not ball washing since I consider myself as one of the people who shouldn’t be asked.

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Asking us questions is like asking little kids "if they are excited for Santa to come this Christmas".. it is just to pacify.. not for any other reason. They are paying you "lip service"and they don't give a flying fuck what you want, nor do they care about what your opinions are.

The ability to downvote already creates a dystopia in which those who have the most money can censor those who don't. And now you want to make that easier?

Every single tiny change made to the blockchain and to the mechanics of Steemit send waves of uncertainty through the economy and in the long run is VERY bad for Steem. Stop tinkering. There's only TWO things Steemit Inc should be focusing on

MIRA

PRESS RELEASES

Do you guys even have a marketing director?

steemit_trends.png

Hiring an actual economist might be a good idea too.

@RT-international came, they were not able to make any news out of that extraordinary chance...

I'm not surprised at all.

So it's OK for those who have the most money to reward you by allocating reward shares to your countent and NOT OK to say that it should be less rewarded?

MIRA is already here.

Press releases are not done by blockchain developers so it shouldn't interfere :-)

Steem is censorship resistant. Allocating rewards has nothing to do with censorship.
(with except of some UI solution on some Steem frontends, but again - frontends)

You obviously were not around for the flag wars. You apparently do not know about @Hajin, @Bernesanders or @Grumpycat. You don't know about @LyndsayBowes or @fulltimegeek. Clearly no one cares if a whale gives a large upvote. But YES the story is different when a single individual can take away the votes of hundreds of people with a single click. Wake the fuck up moron.

Posted using Partiko Android

single individual can take away the votes of hundreds of people with a single click

No.
It doesn't affect those votes.
Those votes are still there.
It affects reward shares that might or might not be allocated to a given content.
Upvotes are rewarded by curation rewards regardless whether they are "good" or "bad". Downvotes are not rewarded regardless whether they are "good" or "bad". It's unfair but it doesn't going to change. The difference is that we are going to remove (to a small extent) a part of costs to downvotes, so anti-abuse could work without additional cost attached.

PS
What exactly are you trying to achieve by calling me "moron"?

Steem =/= Steemit
And how's that have anything to do with downvotes?

Steemit is the number one portal to Steem. How many witness nodes in the top 19 are under the control of the same developers who work for Steemit, or very close to them? Hmm?

Even Facebook removed their thumbs down.

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I don't care about Facebook's thumbs or any other finger. Clicking thumbs there rewards Mark Z. & Co. regardless whether it is up or down. It doesn't allocate parts of rewards pool that are partially yours.

I call you a moron because you can't see something that is clearly in front of you. Have I abused the system by initiating this conversation? Who is downvoting all the comments on this very thread??? not me! Explain why THIS got downvoted:

https://steemit.com/dtube/@lyndsaybowes/z5zm9j1h

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

Downvoting is curation?????

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Soooooo... censorship is "free expression". Got it.

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Psychologically speaking, negative reinforcement is the least effective means of persuasion. If it were, murder would have ceased when death became the punishment.

People who boo and jeer simply have run out of words.

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the problem is not the opinion. The problem is the power law distribution giving the vote a weight. The vote now represents the stake the person voted holds. Not the intelligence, not logic but only the stake.

And why should the stake leverage your opinion? Why is that beneficial for exploring quality content and making social decisions within the DAO? It isn't. One person -one vote --> equal distribution of the social layer --> counteracting the clustering in the 21 Witness dPOS System = effective decentralisation.

This is exactly would those people don't get. Decentralization is a binary property (either you have a central authority or you dont). Distribution is vanilla. The redundancy comes from a combination of both properties.

when you have a decentralized dPOS System with 21 super-representatives but without equal distribution of power --> you end up with a consortium chain/ a concentrated piece of shit. But they don't get it :)


the inventor of Steem gets it, but what does he know?

Explain how this is "curation":

It does not give too many additional resources to users that will use/abuse all that we give them and frees up normal users that may not be downvoting to do so without financial penalty.

A big enough down vote causes the post to be hidden. "Duh"

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Enough targeted downvoting from big enough accounts would cause anyone to leave Steemit. How is that NOT censorship? Go:

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 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

p.s. I'm not the one downvoting you. I don't really downvote as I don't see the point in it. And honestly I would rather people could see your side of the conversation so it's actually quite unfortuante that all your comments have been downvoted in this way.

First of all, thank you for all the countless hours, hard work, blood and sweat you have put into this blockchain. You are truly a technological genius. In fact, this place seems to be filled with quite a few technological geniuses. There are also many brilliant scientific and logical minds.

Unfortunately, what seems to be missing around here are geniuses in the field of human behavior. This idea is a prime example of the lack of expertise in how humans typically behave. This idea seems to hinge on the premise that the people who interact with the blockchain and the content on it will act in a logical way that will benefit the platform as a whole. During the three years I have been here, I have seen no evidence that the majority of people will act this way. There is much evidence to the contrary. People have acted in their own personal short term interest. That is why we have the problems with content that we do.

This idea also implements a system that rewards negativity. I am no expert on human behavior either, but this does not seem like a way to attract masses of people.

Actually I am going to stop. I am not an expert in human behavior. Before doing something so drastic, I hope the team consults with someone who truly understands if this idea will be more likely to attract people to or repel them from the platform.

I understand the value of "you will never know unless you try", but with so much on the line, I would hope the team would do a tremendous amount of research and consult with experts in this area before firing blindly.

I would imagine you would laugh if an expert on human behavior came in and started messing with your code. The converse should also be true. This blockchain is a technological masterpiece, but it has zero value if people do not use it. You have built it, now you need an expert to show you how to get the masses to want to use it.

First of all It is theoretically impossible to run out of upvotes as it takes a percentage of your voting power every time, always leaving some. Also It sounds like you will be leaving money on the table by not using all your down votes. The more you down vote the more it cancels out the rewards allocated, which in turn leaves more rewards for posts not down voted. This means people will down vote just to down vote. This is going to turn into a viscous place with this in place, causing lots of drama, on probably having many people leave the site. I for one will take my investment else where. You will lose active users, and then advertising revenue will go with it. You will be sliting your own throats worse than steemit inc has already done. Is there nothing else more important you can work on... Maybe SMTs, communities... Keeping people here.

If, hypothetically, every single user used all of their downvotes there would be tens or hundreds of thousands of downvotes per day. The drama will fade away into the ether because let's face it, you can't get upset about something that happens literally tens of thousands of times per day to every single post. If nothing else, fatigue over the drama kings and queens trying to turn everything into a personal attack will set in and people will start ignoring it.

Posts will then get ranked and paid out on the basis of which have a more favorable balance of upvotes and downvotes. Some people will upvote stupidly and some will downvote stupidly but mostly that will cancel out and the sensible application of upvotes and downvotes will prevail (unless the majority of the user base and stake are simply stupid, in which case there is no solution). I could not think of a better outcome.

Downvotes are current a big deal and drama today because they are so rare. Whenever it happens it is seen as a personal attack rather than an expression of opinion.

In reality I do not expect everyone to use all of their downvotes, so the favorable outcome described above won't happen, unfortunately. Hopefully we can end up somewhere in the middle.

"Posts will then get ranked and paid out on the basis of which have a more favorable balance of upvotes and downvotes."

And that will still be based on financial manipulation rather than on content quality. That's not curation, and it cannot be made to be. It's profiteering, and that's all it can be.

As I have stated elsewhere I am not opposed to eliminating the reward pool (perhaps in connection with SMTs which can decide whether they want to use voted rewarding as part of their distribution mechanism, or perhaps simply on its own merits). But I don't think we are there yet and more to the point I don't think consensus is there yet to actually do it. So we'll need to try a few things first and if it comes to the point where alternatives are exhausted and things still aren't working that is likely where we will end up realistically.

Rewarding content creation is the primary value of Steem. I do not propose eliminating the pool (except perhaps as SMTs provide improved mechanisms) but eliminating unlimited extraction of rewards. Limiting rewards to some multiple of the median payout (Huey Long algorithm) will eliminate profiteering, if coupled with eliminating curation rewards (not the rewards pool).

We need to draw users to Steem, and rewarding quality content does that. Drawing users to Steem creates the market for Steem, which is why Steem has value. Increasing the market for Steem increases the value of Steem, which provides capital gains to investors. That's what we should be doing.

Encouraging profiteering and flagging is contrary to that, and EIP just makes it more profitable to extract rewards via financial manipulation. If Steem survives EIP making these problems worse, do consider the Huey Long algorithm, and dividends from funding development as mechanisms for creating capital gains.

Limiting rewards to some multiple of the median payout (Huey Long algorithm) will eliminate profiteering

No it won't. It will induce spamming and more low value posting in order to generate the maximum payout for purposes of milking on a larger number of content items.

I see no reason to expect more spam just because unlimited rewards aren't potential. It's remotely possible some folks would post more, lower value content. I don't care. That's an insignificant matter compared to rampant profiteering that has utterly broken curation, and is dropping Steem's market cap about 15 places per year. Leaving downvotes unchanged handles spam with facility now, and would continue to.

'Milking' posts is already done, and the additional work making more posts entails reveals good work ethic. These are trifles compared to the existential threat Steem is under presently, and that EIP would worsen.

Oh, you can run out of voting power. It's just most people don't use more than 20% a day because it takes a day for every 20% you use to recover. Once you hit 0 voting power you can't vote anymore I believe unless that changed with rc's.

Also, there is nothing to say it will turn toxic, like most any social media people came from people are clearly happy to do it for free. So what if you don't get paid out for every post. Why is it expected that you need to? This has added benefits to stop spammers and abusers, way more than it would be used to abuse normal users. Also, no one can really do much damage other than people who have a lot of stake.

If you aren't being downvoted now I doubt you will be by a whale in the future. So a model without incentive doesn't incentivize them to hit a post that is ten dollars they are more likely to go after bot votes.

The only thing people should be worried about the new eip system is whales powering down to alt accounts to take advatage of things.

Sounds like something worth trying.

Im not sure I agree. But Im glad people are spending time thinking about such things... Debate on ideas like this will lead to improvements for Steem, one way or another.

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It only leads to more downvote abusing, and that we have already more than enough on Steem
Or not?
There are other, really much more important changes needed, like to improve the onboarding process for new users.
And to keep account creation for new users free, some movements on Steem already speculate on higher account prices.
Charging users for sign up on Steem will kill Steem.
These are real important things to fix, but for sure not to make downvotes easier.
Have a nice day
Tom

For once someone who sees the issue of the high cost of account creation. The reason it's no longer free the excuse is anti-spam. They can keep the 3 steem burn but the rc cost to create an account is 800-1000x more expensive than any other transaction on the chain.

No company is going to be looking to spend a million dollars for 300k users which they would have a better chance of getting more users cheaper on a non-blockchain based chain with that million dollars going to marketing. So it would be better to have them power up that 300k steem and claim accounts via account credits. They would also be able to benefit the users who come in with delegation and upvotes for content creation as well.

Right now we're looking at like 40+ years to a billion users if we ever want that big of a community which should be the goal to be a household chain. The price for rc claims should be dropped by 10x what they are now. Which is completely ignored when i bring it up.

No company is going to be looking to spend a million dollars for 300k users

This is completely wrong. Customer acquisition costs are nearly always more than a few dollars, sometimes thousands of dollars (tens being common).

There is an added cost to using a blockchain vs a database, on that I would agree, but with the right business models, the cost is easily justified.

Yeah when it comes to marketing, so not only will they have to pay for those users they will also have to do marketing which increases their cost. So why use blockchain instead of a system they know will work and won't cost them just as much if not double.

It only makes sense if the added costs of a blockchain are valuable to the business model. Otherwise it doesn't. Changing the parameters on account creation does not change this, the costs are still there.

However, the point I'm making is that these costs are relatively small compared to the other costs of acquiring customers, so with any meaningful benefit from the blockchain, a business should be able to justify them.

I'm not talking about the steem burn cost's, we only care about the rc cost of account creation. If we lower it by 5-10 times, spending a million on sp for applications is a more viable option. And this is coming from applications we have been in contact with as we try to onboard projects which we will be announcing very soon. We're currently trying to onboard a media company with more than 32 sites.

Since they have to delegate anyways, and if abuse starts to happen we can turn it up. It would still require a certain amount of investment to even make accounts with sp. I think more useful things could come from the sp they own. This could also increase the price of steem as applications would be more willing to power up. Considering no one knows when smt's are coming.

Other options are being made to get users in free but, they're not putting it in priority and if as many users leave that people think will because of the new changes proposed. We need a decent influx of users.

1 comment every 5 days is kind of hard to abuse, They could spam custom_json and wallet memo spam. But with the dex's being made a such how do we expect users to come into our market or have a private wallet or even invest in steem without an account.

I also sent you a pm in slack explaining a bit more.

How complicated would it be to reward users, when they do not vote ?

... in a way that nobody is being forced to vote, but only when they see something they expect good curation rewards for ...

I know this would be a totally different approach, I am just curious, how hard something like this would be to implement ...

Very.. There is no simple way to have users gain rewards without some kind of in-browser mining. And they had something like this in mind for account creation which they ditch to favor locking up the account creation to reduce spam.

So, I doubt a system like this would be made, at least not until after hf21

There already is an inbuilt interest rate for SP holders.

To be more precise with my question:

How difficult is it to decrease an individual account's SP inflation, proportional to their mana ?

I am trying to ask a stinc dev, not you.

I've seen this discussion in the past, allowing stakeholders to lock up their SP in a non-voting state, receive interest similar to bid bot roi but letting those who want to curate and think they can curate better for more rewards do it. It's an okay idea but if any of the recently discussed changes were to come into effect I believe delegating to curation projects or bots that return you the majority if not all of your delegation's curation rewards will be in more favor, not to mention you'll be able to use the downvotes as well.

Maybe not calling them "stinc" would help get their attention to your questions, though.

Sorry if you're disappointed by a non steemit member replying.

'curation projects' like yours ?
You are as bad for steem as bid-bots are.

A lot of problems and leeches here would disappear, if stakeholders were not economically forced to vote.

I will keep calling them 'stinc', after they let this linear rewards mess just sit for 2 years and let a host of bad players stake up heaps.

You're funny, but also weird.

I am not a fan of downvotes in general. But if it imporves steem economics probably is ok.

I mentioned this somewhere else. Would you be able to pass this on to UI team if you find it interesting?

It would be nice to have a “tip” or “gift” button for posts, so users could give authors additional rewards. I know anybody can transfer from wallet. But having this feature on posts might encourage rewarding authors without solely relying on reward pool. It would also develop a gifting culture.

P.S. With tips or gifts content can even be rewarded after 7 days.

An issue with a tip button is needing the active key (to which the social portion of the application does not have access, and encouraging people to grant access frequently is not a good idea) in order to send funds. One solution which has been proposed is a separate 'tip wallet' which can be sent using the posting key, but some people object to that, saying it would make the posting key (and apps which use it) a lot riskier.

It is a tricky problem.

Separate 'tip wallet' that uses posting key is a great idea I think. Since it will only be limited to the 'tip wallet' and users will have to use an active key to transfer to tip wallet I don't it would be risky. Users can choose not to keep anything in the tip wallet, or keep very little. I think this would be a great addition. This way content can be rewarded even after payout.

I was suggesting changes in Steemit UI level though since Steemit has been making UI changes like downvote button, edited, Steemit roles, featured, etc. What I had in mind was a 'tip' button that would redirect to steemitwallet.com with filled form ready to send. Of course not as simple as using a posting key, but something that can benefit authors, especially if author rewards will be going down to 50%.

Maybe something keychain could easily add and it would at the same time get it some more usage. I for instance, started using it today for the first time and already like it.

something like this? !tip

Exactly! But made much simpler to use.

Gosh not sure what to think with this idea in the post...on the surface I prefer this tip idea of yours @geekgirl vs. investing too much effort and dev time into down votes or a negative/stick system.

🎁 Hi @geekgirl! You have received 0.1 STEEM tip from @cardboard!

Check out @cardboard blog here and follow if you like the content :)

Sending tips with @tipU - how to guide :)

There is a tip feature. I regularly get memos from @flagveterans and others with such gifts that read 'this can't be flagged away.'

God bless them!

Please tell me how this will help more people want to come here?

Or even keep the few users we have?

This is going to increase the toxicity on the platform significantly. Receiving a downvote is exponentially worse than not receiving an upvote, emotionally.

Why are we not just waiting for SMTs and communities before we start throwing stuff at the wall?

TL:DR

I think this is a terrible idea that will drive users away and I do not support it.

You are afraid, that you will get flagged. And you should be.

Facts

Posted using Partiko iOS

:)

You're absolutely right!!

Posted using Partiko Android

yeah second to that. rather than the possible benefits, it's guarantee to drive more users away. don't have the numbers maybe someone can help pull out the data.

new users figuring out their way on steem and suddenly some random downvote came. whose there to judge quality? what's useless to some, might be useful to some.

doesnt the flag war and downvotes equate to censorship ? if you dont like the content just move on. Now the idea of rewarding downvote, whoever that thought of it, imagine you're on the receiving end. U create a piece of content thinking it's quality then someone downvote it and be rewarded. how would you feel ?

Posted using Partiko Android

Exactly. We have trouble keeping people with a 30% ROI on their money(steem). What happens when people show up and they get randomly downvoted because... "quality". That is far more damaging than simply not receiving an upvote.

For every user, there is more to take their place who can deal with the system. I heard this phrase used by more than a few high ranking people in the community so some people don't even care. They think the reward split for eip with offset this downvote pool with new users.

There bet in on the 50/50 reward split will bring more users than we will lose with the changes.

"For every user, there is more to take their place..."

No, there's not. Even if there were an unlimited populace of potential users to draw from, this ignores that getting a user has costs. With a dismal retention rate of about ~7.5% YOY, that's a scary argument to make.

"...more than a few high ranking people in the community so some people don't even care. They think the reward split for eip with offset this downvote pool with new users."

"There bet in on the 50/50 reward split will bring more users than we will lose with the changes."

I bet you're talking about bidbot owners. Have you ever noticed a difference between rhetoric and action? Sometimes people say things they don't mean. It's actually a very common practice. Fraud is horribly common, and that's what fraud is.

I'm not saying no one honestly feels this way, but there are certainly people with financial incentive to support proposals such as this which will make their profiteering more profitable. Increasing curation rewards will not in any conceivable way increase retention of new users with insubstantial stakes, because the quantity of rewards they can gain from the work necessary is insubstantial. Most new users won't jump in with substantial stakes, because even fairly simple people will want to test the waters first.

Extant substantial stakeholders are profiteering from their stakes almost to a man. I know of some few that curate for other reasons, and god bless every one of them. They are the exceptions, not the rule.

It is very good to see you posting and discussing change proposals. I find it very encouraging.

That said, I am concerned that we might see a form of extortion racket emerge from this particular change. Especially if delegated power is playing a big part the bidbots on this platform will become very powerful.

We've had a few high profile flag wars in the past but none sticks in my mind more than the way grumpycat bent a few people to his will using flags. There will be great opportunity for large stakeholders and delegation recipients to behave in a similar way without cost or repercussion.

:)

(edited)

lol, that didn't take long

:)
I think this is a good move for the BC to trial. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work but at least we can know definitively.

#1 Question: how would this help steemit/steem grow?

Wouldn't more downvoting cause more drama and conflict on the platform making people want to leave or not join?

The majority of downvoting I've seen are bigger accounts downvoting smaller ones. That's why I see downvoting as more of a bullying tactic than what it was actually designed for with making sure whales can't rape the reward pool.

I think you should focus more on protecting the reward pool from rapes rather handing out free downvotes or WMDs as I would call them to everyone on the platform.

I highly doubt this helps steemit or steem grow, and very likely does the opposite.

Yup, sounds like busy work for idle programmers.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

If whales aren't already using 5 or 10% of their vp to combat this today than I doubt they'd give two shits about it with the free downvotes. Bidbots damage the platform probably more than anything else right now but you don't see whales or Steemit inc doing shit about them.

Well if they are proposing it now and not doing anything currently to fix it I have to wonder if they really care about fixing it.

I think you should focus more on protecting the reward pool from rapes

That's exactly it.

The number one goal of the steem blockchain should be attracting more eyes on the page. Downvoting does not do that. When the downvoting pool gets misused and it will be, you will have people chased off the platform.

The value of a post is subjective and sometimes people are jerks. Downvoting empowers jerks and puts us all at risk. There is no appeal process offered. Instead, empower those people that encourage engagement and a growing community. Change policy so that it is more difficult to scam the system and/or create a block-chained backed downvote curator to deal with the bad hats. Downvote wars are not in the best interest of the steem blockchain. Infighting is not attractive.

Agreed. This will not help attract more users. If anything, this is likely to drive current users away.

For every user, there is more to take their place who can deal with the system. I heard this phrase used by more than a few high ranking people in the community so some people don't even care that we will lose users. They think the reward split for eip with offset this downvote pool with new users.

So, we shouldn't care about the turnover because new users will always be coming in? Yea, that pool tends to dry up pretty quickly, especially when the ones that leave tell all their friends not to join and how terrible this place is.

Of course, we should care about retention.

More users will increase the price of steem. Those with a lot of SP have way more to gain ... astronomically more ... by encouraging the growth of a wider base, we ensure success for everyone.

Check out this comment i left above" https://steemit.com/steem/@thedegensloth/ps1ot8

I proposed we used the method the USA uses to keep dominance on the world using it's currency. Make so many people hold it they have no choice but to use it. This could and likely would have an upwards trend on the market as we see a real-life example of it on a daily.

The ultimate goal should be for us to be in every household. That or making everyone know of the chain.

In order to do that you'll need to discourage profiteering and downvotes. The EIP does the opposite. Improving retention will depend on rising Steem price, as our short history shows.

Every time the ability of stakeholders to extract profits from rewards has been increased, the market cap of Steem has decreased. We've slid about 30 places on CMC in the two years I've been here.

Wanna stop that slide? That's what you'll need to do to make Steem a household name and currency. To do that, you're going to have to encourage SMALL stakeholders to use it, and allowing substantial stakeholders to censor, downvote, and outbid them for rewards doled out by bots does the exact opposite.

That is called capital gains, and it is the essential mechanism that has been relied on by investors since prehistory. Steem has tried to improve on that, along with other improvements, such as rewarding creators for the content by allowing other users to allocate rewards to them for that content. I think rewarding creators has been negatively impacted by the attempted novel mechanism to reward investors, and this can be fixed by eliminating unrestricted payouts that allow profiteers to pervert curation for financial gain. Actual curation has nothing to do with financial manipulation, but is allocating rewards to creators for content quality. The financial manipulation has proven to all but eliminate curation, and substituted profiteering.

Capital gains is THE proven mechanism to drive investment in adding value to the investment vehicle, and this increasing it's price. Rewards pool rape is the opposite of that. Tweaking the rate at which profits are extracted won't fix the problem. It can only tweak how they are extractable. Any extraction of those rewards for profiteering purposes is exactly contrary to imbuing Steem with value and creating capital gains.

@curatorhulk was claimed to have been begun for this purpose. Unfortunately, I've seen no activity from that account of late. @freezepeach does act to counter abusive flags. Some other accounts might do these things too, but I'm not familiar with them because every problem flagging I've sought to rectify has been solved by @freezepeach.

More folks delegating to @freezepeach, and more initiatives begun for this purpose would help.

I am not sure anyone has really sat down and thought this through enough. I understand you Want more people downvoting excessively rewarded post. I get that. Reality bites. Look at the number of minnows and redfish. have you even looked at the number of daily active minnow accounts? have you added up the total SP power (thats the vote power they all have) and seen how much of a monetary effect they can have on a post? A few minutes of a check on trending - largerst with a small scroll is $217.62.

Reality just how much of an effect on that post would all the minnows have? Do you think that all the Daily Using minnows could really make a dent in the payout? Get real people. My 100% downvote would be $0.03 cents. At the bare minnimum of dolphinhood my downvote would be $0.10 cents. You would need 2170 I just became a dolphins to bring it to $0.00. Or 7233 minnows that are able to cast a 3 cent reward.

Like @jrcornel has pointed out, all it will do is increase bad apple trollish behavior and drive more people away from the steem blockchain. I understand that it is already a done deal, that it will be done that there will be a downvote pool and there is not a thing anyone on the blockchain can say to change that. At least take the precaution of requiring a comment before being allowing a downvote to go through.

If you state it like that, maybe what is needed is the ability to down vote the reward rather than the post itself. Think I might look at writing up a blog post on some alternate models for that later. Think we could base some kind of counter proposal for a down vote pool based on that concept. Maybe a downvote pool that never cuts into reputation.

I'm pretty sure that once you get to 60 rep downvotes stop affecting reputation.
Stimialiti wouldn't have his rep, otherwise,...

No, it still does, but the amount needed to drop rep also increases. All it currently requires is your rep being higher than the person to affect reputation negatively.

The idea of downvoting the reward giver did not go over well. You see that would remove rewards from the larger accounts, this is about increasing rewards for larger accounts, or that is the way I see it.

What the fuck kind of latrine trash reasoning do you and other such prophets adhere to?

If it was not meant for minnows and the population in general then they would not have had polls to change the flag to a down arrow, they would not have pinned the Initial couple of EIP post, and they certainly would not have pinned this one for all on steem to see.

History and experimentation show that given unchecked power people will use that power. Take a re-look at the Stanford Prison Experiment, take a look at any social behavior experiment that give the ordinary extraordinary powers. Un like YT, FB, and a few other sites there is no real troll type activity other than the few serial down voters/flaggers on steemit. One does not need to be a prophet to look on seem and see or hear about the of accounts that were bullied off the platform from flaggers. (Some deserved it, others not.)

This downvote pool has never been about anything other than money. I have never said it is about anything other than the big stakeholders wanting to make more money.

It takes large stakeholders to fix it, I thought I clearly pointed that out with showing how many minnows and dolphins it would take to come together and have an effect on a large payout.

Perhaps there is a language barrier for you or a comprehension issue.

a lost in the sauce nonsense Individual

The "large stakeholders do care about the health of the network", they do not care about the health of the network, they care about the health of their investment.

However all that said, thank you for such an enlightening response, I have never been schooled by someone that wants to be screwed in the ass by a bulldozer.

I have an idea! If we could anonymously downvote then things would be much better. The big problem that we have to counter is large accounts abusing their stake. But most are afraid to cross them

I'm not sure if this is very easy to do on the blockchain level. We are hoping to get separately delegatable downvotes which would partially address two primary conerns:

  1. Fear of retaliation of downvotes - If you're a step removed and the downvote bot also has 100 other delegators, you're far less likely to face retaliatory measures.

  2. Whale apathy - We want relatively inactive whales to delegate their SP and help clean this place up in a way that won't interfere with their curation delegations.

Also, if downvotes are handled by a relatively impartial or even anonymous third party, it'll likely be more proportion and precise rather than emotional and potentially unfair.

Yeah, functionally it would be a difficult thing to achieve but the measures you state above would definitely work. Especially number 1. I would be game for that

Yes. The fact that a downvote has a name attached to it means it will be personal and not work as intended. Making this place exponentially more toxic and not likely to attract new users.

Exactly, because more of them can be cast doesn't necessarily mean they will be because of the risk of retribution.

So when Bernie flags your 20 Steem post with a 21 Steem downvote anonymously that would be an improvement? I don't see it. I prefer to know who is abusive.

Well, it is good to have opinions on both sides of the fence! Not all downvotes are abusive though

I do agree that downvotes are a very useful and functional means of handling spam, plagiarism, scams, and similar challenges. I'm just not under the impression that handing Bernie free flags, or enabling him to flag cryptically will be of any benefit. He's not hurting me, and I have not sought any remedy because any cure I can conceive of could only make things worse.

A DV pool is such a cure.

Well on the cryptically front, I don't think some of the larger whales who flag, care who know it. On the other hand little accounts are frightened to flag because of retaliation.

Free flags have their positives as well as potential negatives. I know that personally I have been reluctant to flag too often because it uses up my VP which I prefer to use positively. I will flag more of it doesn't cost me and I suppose that more might too. Then again there is the retaliation factor. So who knows

 5 years ago (edited) Reveal Comment

Yeah, thats quite a good way of getting around it.

Everyone is valuable!

I will check it out, I have always been intrigued by the follow on flag for blah blah comments I see :0)

I appreciate very much your cogent explanations written in layman's terms.

That being said, I really don't understand how you guys have failed to grasp basic social functions as blatantly as you have. The DV pool will not insulate minnows from retaliation, so won't enable the to downvote safely. It will enable censors and bullies to do what they already do, but do more of it at less cost.

I'll let the downvotes and comments on this reply prove my point.

Thanks!

i wonder if you get flagged all the time because of some basic social skills. you know, one mouth two ears sort of thing. hahaha sorry i just couldn't help myself.

You're not wrong. I took a redpill about my social skills a long time ago and don't regret it. I get flagged, as @baah points out, by Bernie. He just picks a target and sticks with it until someone breaks the chain. I don't mind much, since receiving his attention lets me know I'm on the right track. TBH, I don't think he pays much attention to content. He just looks for people that don't pander to him and tries to break them.

:)

i dont think this is a good idea.
why?
when downvotes also pay, then people will create shit content to downvote it first and get curation from others.

platform will end spammed with bad posts.

if it shares reward pool it sounds like DV pays same as UV maybe i misunderstood..

Downvotes with no incentive would just return to the pool. Meaning everyone else gains value from that action, not just the person downvoting. Is what it basically means in short terms.

Yeah you misunderstood. The 'pool' he is talking about is a personal pool of downvoting power. Nothing will change about the effect of downvotes on rewards.

Why is that footer so bloody ugly? I can't trust someone who presents such a lossy image with lousy compression as a individual that has any experience or inclination in "blockchain" "engineering" and "delivering" "a" "decent" "product". Perhaps you should try delivering consistent updates and establishing a pivot style workflow or even just a damn trello board that is exposed to the general public to build up the trust in the community and to show that you have our best interests at heart. (cause you never push updates to git, ever).

My second statement is regarding the reward on this post, I do not for one second believe that you work for free, how dare you not deny rewards on this post as part of steemit team you should not be receiving any beneficiary from the reward pool as you are taken care of by the team. aka Stinc. Aka stop stealing from my reward pool.

This puts a bad stink,(stinc?) over steemit as a whole. When the LEAD DEVELOPER FOR THE CHAIN, robs it.

Please fix.

This doesn't seem like something that will encourage people to buy more steem. It actually seems like it will drive people away. Just my two cents for what's it worth.

People... You are constantly thinking about one single thing, it's redistribution. Redistribution is not how the economy works. The economy is about additional value.

The only question that you should solve is how to make Steem more valuable in USD.

According to everything we know, it means that you need to either:

  • get more users on Steemit platform
  • spread Steem token to platforms that are able to attract users

It's the only thing you should care about.

Imagine If you were VW. Golf sales are not good.
Your solution analogue to this would be: "maybe we should put a real button here"

Wrong answer. VW stocks will grow up if they sell more cars, because VW is not Golf. So they have 30 models in their portfolio.

If someone doesn't want a Golf, they are not going to buy it no matter what. Maybe they want an SUV, maybe a sedan, maybe... Ferrari.

You need to change the product
Or to make a new product

Can you imagine pitching this idea to an outside investor? Or to famous blogger? "We are hosting the platform that you didn't care about for 3 years, but now, there is a new feature - downvotes!"

Please, test on 1000 subjects, and tell me how many of them joined

Haha nice analogy. I can't see how this possibly brings in more new users than it drives away, which means it shouldn't be considered.

Funny how you are everywhere in this thread saying the same things.

Reminds me of you in 2016 copy-paste spamming the same comments over and over. :)

Seems to me the only people complaining are those who know some whales will unleash their furies on them. They are only being kept at bay because downvoting cost them profits right now.

the ww is a of the best cars in the world

Ok, fact check.

How many BTC wallets exist?

It that number comparable to Steem users?

Let's check trading volume,

Bitcoin is counted in tens of billions for BTC and the worst is Cardano, 60 M

And let's check Steem

Hm... Only millions. Not good

The white paper talks about creating a better economy than Fiat and it's not about extracting rewards but powering up rewards

Reference please and equation please?

No. of wallets = correlated with the number of users = correlated with the noise those people create = correlated with the price

Why USD is stable and accepted as universal? Because 5.000.000.000 people know about it and use it.

Would you accept to make a business with Zimbabwe dollars instead?
Why, because nobody has any clue about that currency = it's not stable

problem that steem is solving is all predicated on what crypto is and isn't, and crypto is about removing the financial reins from the bankers

Wait... There is no problem. Banks are working fine. I get my salary on time, I can pay from/to the opposite side of the world, I can plan 30 years ahead. There is no fundamental problem, there are some aspects that could/should/will be improved.

The world is functioning without crypto, keep that in mind.

Can Ripple improve it a bit - yes.
Can we implement crypto in administration - yes
Gain more freedom in trading - yes

Should we replace FIAT with Crypto?
Unless we want a war that would last for 100 years across the globe - no

There should be no downvote button at all, should be a flag still and for only people using someone else material due to copyright and if the user flags someone over some BS, then the user with that flag kills his MANA for a Month.........

They do not care about what helps the creators. The have one concern, and one concern only. "How do we line our pockets with more of the fools money"... every step taken is done with this sole goal in mind.

This would mean that if a whale has you on target (e.g. because you downvoted him) it is even easier (less costly) for him to steal nyou all your earnings.

I think any belief in the wisdom of the crowd is a fallacious assumption. People lack the virtues needed for just self-policing which is why rights such as freedom of speech must be coded into law and enforced with violence in the real world. Encouraging downvoting will open new avenues of self-righteous mob-mentality witch hunts where gangs will begin voting against those with whom they disagree or those who have downvoted them instead of honorably curating rewards.

I've noticed that the changes proposed by Steemit almost always favor the largest wallets and that's no surprise considering their stake, however I do appreciate the recent attempts towards open and honest communication on the blockchain.

Agreed. Wisdom of the crowd just doesn't work when money is involved. Increasing downvotes and as a result, toxic behavior, is a terrible idea.

Except downvotes or negative votes work in any other social media system. So because users won't get paid out every post now its an issue? Just remember what system we came from. This no way at all effects how users post.

You can almost bet anti-abuse groups will pop up because of this. And their incentive is the curation the get for helping someone out who was attacked. So its a win win.

Neither @curatorhulk nor @freezepeach who have undertaken to mitigate flag abuse concerned themselves with financial rewards in the slightest. Their incentive was non-monetary. Society is far more valuable than it's economy, and disregarding that is less than optimal.

I dunno what happened to @curatorhulk, but @freezepeach is around. Instead of postulating their motives from nescience, just ask them why they do it. Curation rewards already exist, and no one is countering flags to receive them, nor have I ever heard of anyone doing so for that incentive. Far more valuable returns were their goal.

Fairness, opposing bullies, censorship, and idiots are all real reasons people have acted to oppose flags. Apparently, those are more valuable than curation rewards.

@curatorhulk is still around! I've gotten upvotes from them (and I'm not a target of flags).

That is good news. Last time I approached them about some friends that were being flagged I received no response from them.

This is completely different because money is involved. When money became involved it changed the game. It can't operate like any other system. The community has proven that downvotes will not be used altruistically or responsibly but instead levied personally. Which will happen again here for the vast majority of downvotes, guaranteed.

Nothing has been 'proven' because what happens under one set of economic rules and balances are very different from another.

It could very easily work out exactly the opposite of what you are claiming because the trolls are willing to pay the high price for their abusive downvotes, but others are not willing to pay that price for altrustic annd beneficial downvotes (which increase rewards to legitimate users and contributors by pushing them back from the milkers). So by keeping the cost of downvotes high, as it is now, you end up with only abusive downvotes and toxicity, but with cheaper downvotes you have non-trolls willing to use them for good.

Lol of course. You can make any counter argument for just about anything and we can't 'know' for certain how it would go unless it is first tested. However, stepping back and thinking logically, do you actually believe that is how this is going to play out? I think we both have a pretty good guess as to what is most likely to happen with free downvotes... and that is them being used primarily for personal reasons as opposed to responsible and altruistic curation.

Given that context I highly doubt this change ends up encouraging people to purchase steem and likely is a net negative to both the price of steem and steemit.com.

we can't 'know' for certain how it would go unless it is first tested

We agree on this

I think we both have a pretty good guess as to what is most likely to happen with free downvotes... and that is them being used primarily for personal reasons as opposed to responsible and altruistic curation.

I think they are likely to be used for both. In fact they already are, just on a very small scale, and that small scale introduces a severe imbalance in the system which opens it up to a vast degree of milking and other value-destroying behaviors. That is a far bigger problem than a relatively small amount of trolling. That is my view.

But, again, we don't know until we try. The rate of iteration on Steem/Steemit is far too low in my view. If we only get to try something every few years there is really no chance of reaching a better outcome before Steem sinks permanently into obscurity.

People don't flag whales because whales can flag them back far harder, not because it costs them VP to do so. It takes thousands of minnows to flag away bot votes on shitposts, and they're not going to do it. One whale can flag them all into the negative and then none of the minnows posts will be visible at all.

The only people that will take advantage of free downvotes are those that already use their VP to downvote, either because they don't care if they're flagged into the dust, or because they have enough SP to deploy.

You neglect that minnows can be crushed by retaliation. Making downvotes free to minnows does not protect them from retaliation. That's the real reason minnows don't police whales, not because it costs them VP to flag.

I mostly agree, but I would say it is additive. You have the risk of retaliation and also the cost. Reducing the cost helps somewhat, but it doesn't go all the way, and indeed may not work.

The whale experiment was completely different. It was 2 whales capping influence at X vests. Any vote that was cast that was higher than that amount was countered (negated) with a downvote. It had nothing to do with quality. It was simply removing the largest votes so everyone else's votes had more influence.

The whale experiment you refer to achieved exactly the purpose of the Huey Long algorithm I have proposed: limiting the profiteering potential of perverting curation via financial manipulation.

The only differences were that the algorithm was different, and it wasn't cast in code, but done by altruists. It didn't last because it wasn't cast in code as the Huey Long algorithm would be. No downvotes would be necessary from the Huey Long algorithm to achieve the same purpose.

Seriously can't understand how more people aren't seeing that this is what will happen.

It's mind boggling that they think this is a good idea and will improve steemit.com... literally mind boggling.

Police don't allow mobs to go around lynching people which is the type of behavior this change is encouraging. It's not about community self regulation either like it's being sold. This only empowers the largest wallets, of which there are few, with the largest ones being those who are proposing these changes. It's regulation by the 1% just like the mainstream media where billionaires use their power to produce propaganda rags for their cause and stifle dissenting voices. All of the changes I can see Steemit making are ones that favor their position on the blockchain, including normalizing a culture of downvoting behavior, and providing free downvoting mana so the largest wallets, most of whom are anonymous and could easily be multi-accouting, can more easily steer the reward pool into their own hands.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

What makes you think "the Whale experiment" was a success?

You mean this stuff?

https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/the-whale-voting-experiment-explained-including-downvotes-from-abit

Looks like a total clusterfuck with zero data on what happened and therefore no way to measure success. Most of the comments are negative and it looks like several people left the platform over it.

https://steemit.com/steemitstrike/@kafkanarchy84/steemit-strike-apology-to-followers-and-announcement-of-indefinite-break-from-blogging

https://steemit.com/steemit/@karenmckersie/hello-abit-smooth-steemit-stike-notice-is-on-your-experiment-did-not-work

However I did not ask what other people thought of it, I asked why you thought it was a success. Care to answer that question or not?

My lazy ass needs links to that trove of info about the “Whale Experiment”, care to point me in the right direction?

I am glad you pointed out your comment was entirely nonsensical. People cannot police themselves contradicts claiming they must be policed by people.

Read your comment again. Laugh with me.

We need to get rid of the privilige between Steemi.com and the reward ward pool. Steem is not Steemit.com and therefore the reward pool shouldn't be tied up with your application this is an unfair advantage compared to all other dapps running on Steem. We need a fundamental step in the right direction to become an independent dapp economy.

Posted using Partiko Android

What privilege? All apps use the same reward pool.

Think about it twice. Are you able to mine Steem while playing Magic Dice, Steemmonsters or Next Colony except the fact that you are making post about this Dapps???

Posted using Partiko Android

That's a choice the apps make about how to structure their model. They do have the same access to the reward pool as steemit.com, they just choose not to make use of that.

Anyway, if you mean that these apps should have an opportunity to be subsidized by stakeholders without getting involved with posts, comments, votes, etc., then SPS (expected to be part of the next hard fork) is what you are looking for. App developers will be able to make a proposal on how their app adds value and stakeholders can vote to provide funding for it.

How can you say that is a choice of the dapp developers when its not possible to make a gambling app thru just posting content. The point is that Steem Blockchain is not only about making post or creating content, but in the current system the only way to mine Steem is to create content or curate on content. This is an unfair advantage to all blogging interfaces compared to other dapps. If we want to have an functioning SMT environment than the Proof of Brain mechanism of Steemit.com needs to be removed and put in the hands of all SMT and community projects. Just to make changes in the reward curve structure won't bring us further towards the goal to have a thriving SMT economy. Steem on the base layer should only be good for voting for witnesses, voting for proposals on the Steem foundation and maybe voting for dapps/community main accounts to allocate some rewards of the reward pool.

Posted using Partiko Android

Maybe when we have SMTs we can look into it. I'm not opposed to removing the Steem reward pool in favor of lower inflation if and when SMTs are able to serve the function.

Alternately we can offer different ways of getting payouts from the reward pool such as SPS and apps which can make the case they are or will be bringing value to Steem can apply for funding.

Great idea, I hope that we will see some fundamental changes in that direction. Thanks for your understanding!

An extremely valuable addition to SPS would be a mechanism to pay dividends for such development funding. Making adding value to the investment vehicle more profitable would encourage such funding.

Coupled with ending the ability of stakeholders to financially manipulate curation to extract rewards, via something like the Huey Long algorithm I have proposed, this would reverse the incentives from extracting value from Steem to adding value to it.

Capital gains is the gold standard for reasons to invest.

Do not do this.

Making this change will be the final nail in the coffin for this place.

The amount of infighting this downvote pool will bring will far outweigh any supposed benefits. Guaranteed.

Do not do this.

Maybe try and fix the real problem with downvotes first:

Downvotes, as only corrective measure create a situation where there is real insentive to choose more disruptive use of stake to maximize profit (running a bid not, messing up the trending pages and messing up the reputation system) over less disruptive behaviour for maximizing proffits (commenting on your own posts and upcoming those comments).

Currently bid not owners are abusing the reward pool while being more or less bullet proof as long as they don't post or comment. The worst of the bid bot users, through using bid bots all of the time boost their reputation enough to gain the higher ground against most potential down voters, as we have all learned retaliation is a bitch and down voting someone with a higher (in this case, false-) reputation than you isn't wise.

Have a look at the results from this poll. While opinions differ on what behaviour by passive stake holders is preferable, everyone seems to agree running a bidbot is not.

I mentioned two possible measures in my counter proposal post that could help actually address creating the preferable incentives instead.

  • Make reputation impact of upvotes opt-in and document it as being meant only to be used by actual personal user wallets, not by bid bots. That would address much of the false reputation created by bid bots today.
  • Implement a blockchain wide advertising economy. For users, bid bots are free limited scope advertising. Provide them with better alternatives, and not only would that disincentive bidbots, it will also create a tool for drawing in new top content providers, away from other blogging and blogging platforms.

As with the linear convergent rewards that is a bad idea once you do the math, because it does nothing to incentify huge fish to behave, whilst hitting new users disproportionally hard, this part of the proposal too is more likely to worsen the platform economics than to better it.

I know these posts are done mostly for show and you guys already have made up your minds about implementing these "features" as long as the top witnesses are on board (and it seems most of those guys are easily confused by a bit of high school level math), but in the end, these three measures seem to all be tailored specifically, not to improve the economic position of the platform within the world ecconomy but to improve the ecconomic position of Steemit Inc within the STEEM economy. I hope I am wrong about this, and that you will look at the arguments against these specific measures and alternatives suggested my me and others.

The Reputation system is useless and not trustless anyways. So in no case should people be looking at that as a way to trust people on this network. Since you can buy reputation from bots. It started broken.

 5 years ago (edited) Reveal Comment

The complete failure of promoted I think is why we have bid bots turning trending into what promoted could have been. A better and broader advertising economy could be more than just a money burning feature. It could pull in top content providers with add revenues paid out in SP, while allowing STEEM users the opportunity to buy targeted advertising without having to move funds out of the STEEM economy. A fully functioning revenue sharing adds economy that isn't just inward facing I think could remove most incentive to use bid bots as way to mock a working promoted feature.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

The simplest thing is to change the home page to promoted.

Yup, the simplest thing should have been the more you burn, the higher up in trending you go. Instead, we have trending based on rewards, which is super easily gamed.

Meh. Not like they would change it.

What makes more sense than changing the home page to promoted (few people want to see only ads) is to include a few of the promoted posts on the trending page like pretty much every other major internet site with similar content (reddit, google search results, many news sites, etc.)

Yes, that and not burning all of it, but allow people making a blog post to opt in to advertising and advertising revenues. There are top content providers that won't ever make the move to STEEM today, and surely won't if the screw-new-users-over convergent linear rewards were implemented, that might be sueded by swapping their current reliable add revenues by reliable add revenues in SP plus the chance to play orca/whale lottery that by itself clearly isn't pulling in any of the big guns.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

This is not about to happen as the majority of the bidbot delegated sp comes from where exactly? :)


You've got DRAMA. You are going to be a Whale!

To view or trade DRAMA go to steem-engine.com.

My two cents:

Yes, it is unfortunate that flags drain the same resource pool that could otherwise earn and give rewards, but bots will be built to game any system you build.

Right now, one of the biggest problems is bid bots distorting curation. Do we want it to be that simple for people to buy whale flags against other people that are effectively free? How would your proposal be abuse-resistant?

Also, if Steemit is officially no longer in beta, please don't propose using the entire system as an experiment again. It feels reckless.

Agreed. I thought we were no longer in BETA?! This screams of beta testing.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

Count me in on the downvote pool.
Two per day would effectively double my downvotes.
All hail, @steemflagrewards' downvoting trail!
(And smooth's rendition of this pool.)

I'd be remiss if i failed to state that a vote cap that affects ~70 accounts, the ones with the most to gain from steem's use as a currency/store of value, solves steem's controlling issue more elegantly, imo.
Join it with curation that rewards finding 'good' content earlier than others, and we might actually reward content creation/curation.
This proof of wallet sucks, as attested to before we took this little detour to ease onboarding/accumulate even more stake.

With mira taking server costs to insignificant levels, maybe we can extend our crowd of witnesses' wisdom a little,...

Good idea, yep if there was a big enough reward for downvotes i would just down vote myself all day long lol, Cant wait thanks, oh i would have given you a bigger upvote but wasted my VM on acidyos 'downvote this post' blog. sorry :)

If you're on the Steem front-ends every day, you know these destructive elements, they are only here to disturb you. Everyone should get a virtual house right to save the own blog and the possibility to ban others. The banned should have read only right and nothing more. Result: No flag wars, no downvote wars --> PEACE!

How am I supposed to counter bidbotted crap with my tiny downvote pool?

Posted using Partiko Android

Next, there will be downvoting bots!

Posted using Partiko Android

Would only be reasonable if we follow that reasoning. Can't think how that would have unintended consequences ;)

Posted using Partiko Android

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

Are you saying downvote pools won't change a thing? Why do it then?

Posted using Partiko Android

Do you think mana costs kept people from downvoting offensive content?

Posted using Partiko Android

In order to do the right thing maybe.

Posted using Partiko Android

I have never heard anybody complaining about the outrageous costs or missing incentives of downvoting.
It will only encourage frivolous downvoting.

Posted using Partiko Android

Thanks. I have been following the discussion.

Posted using Partiko Android

It’s nice to see an article from a Steemit engineer—thank you!

As far as incentivizing downvotes, @vandeberg—no thank you. You can’t be serious, right? Where’s Ashton?

The nature of a decentralized system is that you can't really force anything on anyone, including rules of civil discourse or even basic decency. On the other hand, you also don't have an authority defining those things for you and kicking you out if they don't like you.

No one can be kicked off the network they can, in fact, take peoples worth out of every post they make and that's the freedom of owning stake. But no one can kick you off the chain unless witnesses for you or your content off and that would have to be a pretty big extreme to happen.

https://github.com/steemit/irredeemables/blob/master/full.txt

Upvotes from the accounts on this list are 'mystery' votes, as these accounts are completely censored presently and upvotes from them are not named. All of their posts and comments are never shown on front ends today.

There are means of revealing them, but those means are almost mythical, they are so unavailable to ordinary users. That's pretty much kicked off the platform. The data may be on the blockchain, but almost no one can see it.

Well, guess what? If those stuff show on the frontends, you ain't loading up posts they choose to spam on.

Do you think frontends did it for the lolz? Spamming thousands of comments to a post has been a tactic to prevent people from literally seeing the post for some time.

And you don't even need to be tech savvy to see this so-called "censored" info on the blockchain. Direct links work just fine on ANY frontends if you really enjoy seeing the same spam so much.

Edit: @smooth corrected me.

Witnesses have nothing to do with that list. It is a front end feature; witnesses handle the blockchain itself (could be called the back end, in very imprecise terms).

I didn't say there was no justification for this. I pointed out that it was in fact happening, and that @thedegensloth was incorrect to say we can't be kicked off the platform without a hard fork. That list is functionally kicked off the platform, and the only thing between folks on that list and the rest of us is the good will of Steemit.

Regardless of the reasons for Steemit putting folks on that list, there are always more reasons to put people on lists. Lists always expand. What's keeping you off that list? How do you know all the accounts on that list are actually there because of spam? What if @ned went round the bend, or on a bender, and took issue with someone's comments about his hair and stuck them on the list without even mentioning it to anyone? Who would even know?

Why not let individual bloggers apply that list on their blogs, or at least have the option to unlist folks on their posts?

Centralized censorship has become a reality on Steem front ends, and something is going to happen to make that worse if that power isn't decentralized. I realize this was a stopgap measure and undertaken for good cause. The road to hell is a shortcut paved with good intentions.

MIRA can fix this. It is my hope that Moore's Law continues to hold, and also that MIRA can even be improved, such that virtually every account and user can host their own node. If that becomes much more true than it is now, Steem can be truly decentralized, and individual accounts will have to be the loci of censorship, at least this mechanism of censorship.

Until then we just have to trust the listmakers.

How do you know all the accounts on that list are actually there because of spam?

Why don't you go check them out one by one and come back to tell me more about it? That list applies to Steemit. Other frontends can choose whether or not they want to use it.

Just like with @thedarkoverlord, different frontends hid different items based on what they feel is appropriate. The difference between that and your traditional "centralized censorship" is people can still readily access what they did and they are not gone permanently.

In fact, I believe all frontends should be able to choose what they want to display based on the audience they are trying to attract.

I'll take your points seriously when someone actually receives the hardfork, aka actually gone, treatment.

"Other frontends can choose whether or not they want to use it."

Not to my understanding. This list is implemented via the nodes, and other front ends are using the nodes Steemit provides, according to the very limited grasp I have of this mechanism, and that is why Steempeak and Busy are also being impacted. That's why MIRA could solve the problem.

"...people can still readily access what they did..."

No they can't. People can't extract data from the blockchain anymore than they can build automobiles from scratch. People are functionally limited to publicly available front ends, just as much as they are commercially available cars.

Either trust is a vector for fraud or trustless mechanisms are extant. This list is not a trustless mechanism. You refer to the extant list as if that's the only possible implementation of this mechanism. I tried to point out some humorous examples of why that isn't reasonable, but you seem to have failed to grasp that fact. What if ISIS sent a few thugs to the home office and politely requested some additions or removals from the list? What if CNBC, Russia, or Israel buys Steemit.com? What if hackers attack that centralized single point of weakness?

The status quo won't persist indefinitely, and even if you trust the listmakers today, who makes that list is going to change, as is the list itself. You may not grasp that your trust of those making that list is a vector for fraud, but no victim of fraud ever did until after the fact. I don't distrust @ned to implement this mechanism without fraudulent intent. I just know that @ned isn't any more permanent than I, criminals will seek weaknesses to exploit, and only decentralization prevents centralized power from being projected.

There are some obvious big whale villains that need stopping, but also flag/downvote wars is just not the way to build an open and welcoming community.

I haven't run/seen any simulations/scenerio's to know the effect of the down vote system proposed here...I think some people are reasonably hinting this would be useful, i.e. seeing some practical use case examples might help my tired brain see the benefits (vs. just jumping it straight into production).

I think the key priority should be on ensuring those whom provide good content, past, present and future get a just and fair reward.

I would like the engineers to look at things in the works with these 3 lens as well. Thanks for asking @vandeberg what could be looked at next. My feedback is whatever you look at, can you think about the result with the above 3 lens, and then present pros, cons, etc to back up its been thoroughly thought through (although I'm sure its clear in a few people minds, with out some stick figure diagrams, my brain is too tired to work out :))

This focus of giving a carrot is far more like to improve the view of the platform then chasing and hitting bad people making pennies with a stick.

I know everyone wants to be treated fairly and the focus should be on more content, fun experiences and positive actions and rewards (not removal of rewards and the controversy it brings).

I think of the analogy of a bunch of managers spending their time checking how many days sick and employee has off and month...and finding a way to put a stop to it...wasting hours hitting them with a stick and making them feel guilty - when instead if they focused on the peoples strengths and getting performance up.

All the best

I think one of the bigger concerns is that larger accounts can obliterate earnings for someone they don’t like. Having a separate pool helps in that they can obliterate without cost to themselves. Perhaps the downvote can be a one person, one vote system rather than a percentage of SP. This gives the smaller accounts some opportunity to successfully downvote unremarkable content by bigger accounts, removing the immunity from losing rewards they would otherwise have. For example, if your self vote is worth $2.40 and a downvote from a small account is worth $0.001, you can afford many downvotes without concern.

A one person, one vote system could work on percentages. Your self vote and one downvote would be worth 50% of the reward. One self vote and two downvotes would be worth 33% of the reward. The percentages would be based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. This would also prevent a bunch of big accounts helping each other out with massive votes as the dishonest upvotes would also get cut by the ratio of upvotes to downvotes.

For example, 3 big accounts vote up a post to $4 and 6 smaller accounts downvote. Total 9 accounts. That’s 33% ratio. Reward goes down to $1.33.

Since it’s going to be a separate pool of downvotes anyway, they should operate differently too.

Posted using Partiko iOS

The amount of bad actors that are whales, is way outnumbered by whales who don't do these things. You can almost guarantee anti-abuse guilds will start to combat these actions if found to be abusive.

The odds of people getting downvoted by whales in a system that doesn't reward them when they have most of their stake in vote bots is very doubtful. Since most high-value votes are bot votes which they help provide votes for.

"You can almost guarantee anti-abuse guilds will start to combat these actions if found to be abusive."

Why? It's been done during the whale experiment. It didn't last. They don't do it now. I see no reason at all any that aren't now will do so just because it doesn't cost VP. The other costs of doing so will remain, and are more substantial.

It would depend on how many people downvoted the individual post.

A 100 steem post would get chopped down to 50 if it’s the self voter and the downvoter. 33 on the second downvote. 25 on the third. 20 on the fourth.

We’re talking about curation, right? A bad post should get multiple downvotes if people take the job seriously.

If you have a post at 100 Steem and there is an upvote/downvote split at 50/50 with 100 voters, the reward is only 50. In this case, something else is happening because curation will tilt heavily for or against a post.

If the votes are not heavily skewed, then it’s likely a vote war. The one person one vote for downvotes method would ensure that the creator doesn’t walk away empty-handed.

It would also discourage team votes. If your upvotes are worth $1 at 100%, but you’re trying to help your friend by upvoting his lame post, a downvote would cut your share too.

It has to hurt the bad content creator and also the accomplices.

On the other side, if it’s good content with lots of upvotes, let’s say 50 upvotes, then losing 1/51 of the reward for one downvote would be negligible. It protects genuinely good content.

Whereas ownership downvotes strongly favor big accounts. A popular post with 100 upvotes can be zeroed our by one big account. There is no protection for genuinely good work.

Upvotes by ownership. Downvotes by percent of votes.

Posted using Partiko iOS

To be clear, I’m satisfied with the way it is now. The fact that they are asking means they intend to monkey with the downvote. I think that whatever gets instituted will have people figure out how to game it out of principle.

Posted using Partiko iOS

It seems adding a downvote mana pool removes, largely, the cost of downvotes and that seems unwise.

A downvote should "cost" the voter. Because that cost imports meaning to the act of voting.

Posted using Partiko Android

This is why we are proposing only allowing a portion of downvotes for free. The goal is to reduce the cognitive load on the "microtransaction" of a downvote to free users to curate without financial burden.

The real cognitive load on minnows who would consider downvoting a whale self-vote or bidbot vote is retaliation. Since one whale can counter thousands of minnow votes, and very few cases of so many votes exist, it's extremely unlikely that minnows would brave retaliation even if it didn't cost them VP to do so.

The only reason I get rewards today is because downvotes cost Bernie. If he got them for free, I'd get no rewards at all.

This is a bad idea, and it will make things much worse.

What financial burden? Vests?

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

Pass that bong to me! And back to skool you!!!

Where can I buy that mana for steem you are baffling about? /facepalm

Author Rewards and Curation Rewards are vests, and SBD is a different kind of animal.

When I downvote, I will not receive vests as curation reward. So that's a financial burden.

No, There is no mana, like there is no steempower.

There are vests and resource credits. When I vote I lose voting power and resource credits. Both are used to limit my ability to receive vests as rewards proportional aligned with how much vests I have as steempower.

Steem is deposited in the steem vesting fund. The only way in is to buy steem with fiat. When you power up the steem is put in the steem vesting fund and you receive your share of vests as steempower.

SBD is a convertible note, a promise to receive 1 USD worth of steem out of the steem vesting fund through conversion. The steem is still locked in the steem vesting fund. hint

If I choose 100% payout you receive vests, if you choose 50%-50% you receive vests and a promise(SBD).

The costs are "resource credits" proportional aligned with how much vests I own.

Through the use of dynamic fractional reserves we all pay for transaction costs.

It limits the ability to receive rewards.

A user would have to earn rewards at an 8.45% rate to combat (inflation/dilution) just to break even after paying for these transaction costs...

Read the fuk-king whitepaper. :)

Understood

Posted using Partiko Android

Wow, my English is not good, but what I understand is that all those flag bots will have more reasons to do it, why not make an effort to eliminate the bots before everything?

Honestly is a downvote even needed? And if YES then there is a bigger issue.

If someone is going to come on here and just post garbage but has a ton of steem power to their name who are we to say they can or can't post it ?

The only time I have ever seen downvotes really used was when whales are attacking other people which seems totally unfair.

Why not just leave it as only upvotes. You have the choice to upvote good content but if you don't feel it is worthy well then simply you don't upvote it.

This to me seems like the easiest solution to everything.

Perhaps something else needs to be looked into if we are worried about crap content being upvoted crazy high. Or then again maybe we shouldn't care if they are holding a 300k steem power up ?

IF we could make the change to a Huey Long algorithm that prevented huge extractions of Steem by financially manipulating rewards, bidbots and self voters would find new businesses. I have proposed dividends from funding development of SPS proposals. However, spam and plagiarism would still remain, and flags would be able to continue to solve those problems - as they do now.

I am pretty sure 90% of steemit is self voting anymore honestly. Remove downvotes and remove self voting. Everything would go to bot upvotes. We been through this battle for the last two years and nothings changed I don't see how it would honestly. Unless bots where removed, self voting was removed so you would be forced to vote others content.

The only effective measure against self-voting is downvoting. If you are right that 90% of steemit self-voting then it is strong evidence that this proposal is needed.

I just wanna say your comments have been golden like usual, thanks for the entertainment reading through this thread.

"The only effective measure against self-voting is downvoting."

False. The Huey Long algorithm would limit huge payouts and eliminate the ability of profiteers to extract nominal funds by manipulating rewards.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

rude

We need a word for the folks that paid for their reps.
Like flaggot, but for people that buy their own trophies.
Maybe, prep?
Might bend some prepper (survivalist) feelers.
Any ideas?

Keep up the good work Team Steemit

Nether upvoting nor downvoting on steemit is fair nor does it help the platform. It is but a circlejerk of the people with power! I have long given up making a difference here as any proposal to actually make the platform worth something culturally run on deaf ears. why because the people in control don't care how they make their money, just that they make it . How is it otherwise that you have amazing posts voted up by hundreds of people that make mere pennies but shit posts that make hundreds with a few powerful votes.

All this talk about wanting to engage people is just a smoke screen, sure give the power trolls another way to further degrade the forum by making their downvotes pay - because we all know that no matter how we minnows try to downvote the power shit posts we would not even make a dent in it !

you want to make this place worth something make votes count equally! one vote per account with equal power to all ! like this the community would actually care and those who create quality content would actually be rewarded ... but i know this wiill just run on deaf ears again ...don't even know why I still try ...

Right because everybody from India is a scam artist is that what you are saying ? do you really think that anyone has the time to manage 1000+ accounts . That being said there could be an account verification process example anyone under 1000 steem invested that wants to vote would have to do an ID check or wait .. the current system is broken and mirrors our real world power dynamics that is literally killing humanity's future , this place was supposed to be better ...

Here take a downvote and pay me for it! thanks! I just don't like the idea of paying people to downvote, that would cause an enormous problem where we get bots that attack and suck even more money just to attack because they hate steem and love eos or whateve project they were sent from to destroy us!
You know what I would do if this were the case I would make a down vote bot because this would just give me the incentive!. See what I mean. And then the top bid bot guys will make even more of the steem??? lol Then everyone would! This could open pandora's steem chest! lol

Good luck with that. I don't have an answer for you on this one.

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